Guitar warm-up exercises are crucial. A good warm-up routine makes your hand movements smoother and faster, making all the job easier later.
Guitar Warm-Up Exercises: finger stretching
The first thing I do is to stretch my left and right hand fingers. Keep your arm straight forward, with the back of your hand towards your face. Now, using your other hand, pull your fingers towards your face (but don’t pull back too hard) and hold them is this position for a while.
Fingers stretched, let’s pick up the guitar and play some exercises. These exercises I learned from videos, books or other guitar players and helped me a lot on my warm up routine.
Guitar Warm-Up Exercises: Ex. 1 – Finger stretching
The first one is still a stretch exercise. It helps developing left hand flexibility and strength. Take a look at the sequence of patterns below:
The idea here is to play these patterns one after another. Try some variations too, like moving them up and down the neck or changing the string set you play them (e.g. if you play a pattern on high E, B, G and D strings, try playing it on G, D, A and low E strings).
Also, theses patterns are quite linear. If you can’t play pattern no. 4, you won’t be able to play the no. 5 and so on. So, it’s important that you can play one pattern clearly before you move on to the next.
I show these patterns here as arpeggios, but you can play them as chords, using alternated picking or sweep picking if you want. It really doesn’t matter because we’re focusing on our left hands now.
Now let’s take a look at the picking hand.
Guitar Warm-Up Exercises: Ex. 2 – Picking hand
Now our focus is on alternate picking and right hand coordination. For this, I’ll use a simple exercise, shown below.
Play it using alternate picking and go changing the pattern position on the neck (for instance: it’s originally in C; so play it first in C and then in D and then in A and so on). And also go alternating the picking pattern: start the first sequence with a downstroke and then the next with an upstroke and so on.
Guitar Warm-Up Exercises: Ex. 3 – String skipping
Continuing on right hand exercises, now we’ll get into alternate picking with string skipping. For that, choose a chord progression first. I’ll use this one: E D G A.
Now I’ve chosen a chord progression, I’ll show the picking pattern we’ll use. It’s quite simple: pick the low E string then D; pick the A and G; pick D and B; and so on. Add a major 3rd to the chord on high E string and you have the arpeggiated chords of the progression. Keep the pick close to the string for more accurate picking and start it slow then go building your speed.
Guitar Warm-Up Exercises: Ex. 4 – Left/right hand coordination
Now we’ll work on both hands and develop coordination. The next exercise is a variation of the well known ‘1-2-3-4’ exercise.
Guitar Warm-Up Exercises: Ex. 5 – Left/right hand coordination and string skipping
Now the last exercise! This one is also a variation of ‘1-2-3-4’ pattern and it’s excellent to develop coordination. We work alternate picking and string skipping. Here it is:
All the exercises here should be part of your warm up routine. Everyday before you play you should warm up – it makes things a lot easier.
I suggest a 30 minute warm up before practicing or playing a gig. And don’t hurt yourself! If you can’t play an exercise, don’t push it. Stop, relax and make a massage on your fingers to help the blood flow and then start over.
Remember: these are only warm up exercises, so don’t rely on them when making music. You don’t want to sound like an exercise, do you?